Review of Luke Goebel's FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS

Despite
its billing as a novel, Fourteen Stories…is
more a kinetic collection of connected short stories about loss and grief.
Using urgent prose, Goebel introduces us to an emotionally damaged, unreliable
narrator attempting to reconcile his heart and mind: “Bottom line, I’m
suffering from lost love. I’ve waited till I was about thirty to do more than
have sex.” Haunted by a woman who broke his heart and raw from the sudden loss
of a sibling, the narrator stumbles and grapples to find meaning and to fill
the void through throwaway relationships, travel, and peyote. He’s both macho
and insecure and not above fantasizing about murdering his betters. Early
on the writing runs rough when Goebel forces his hand and allows the oft aggressive
narrator too much grandstanding, though things smooth out in “Tough Beauty” and
“Apache” where the beauty of the prose does all the heavy lifting: “From the
rain would come blanket flowers, Mexican poppies orange across the hills,
hibiscus, lupine, wild onion, owl’s clover—names of flowers Apache had said
over again, pointing to the dry dead earth on their first rides, blue fiesta,
brittlebush, creosote flower, signaling what would go where, as if by the magic
of names he could summon colors from the earth’s palette covering the land of
dry dust, horses from his very heart, women from his very loins, bones from his
bad hand, life from life, simply by naming, so great were his stocks in the
whole thing.” Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction, Fourteen Stories…exists on the fringe of
convention and thus challenges the reader to adjust. Throughout, the narrator
acts as a shape-shifter, plunging in and out of the text with varying degrees
of intensity. Readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness writing will get their
fill in the chapter “Out There”, though readers seeking a defining, overall arc
best look elsewhere. What holds everything together is the narrator’s sense of
urgency and grief, and as an expression of grief Fourteen Stories…is everything readers can reasonably expect: unpredictable
and wild, pensive and longing. There is no shortage of wow moments in terms of
interesting turns of text, though for every firework herein there exists its less
dazzling counterpart. The work is at its best when Goebel plucks the microphone
from his narrator’s hand and allows the writing to finds its balance where it
often yields a perfect mixture of churning, chugging focus and manic
imagination. (September 2014)